John, at Rest
by ZuWang
Summary: A serial killer's first attempts at horror pale in Sherlock's mind when John is injured. Warning: injured soldiers curse. A lot. With thanks to my readers, this story is now complete.
1. Chapter 1

**I've been holding this one for a while, unsure if I should post it. It's complete, as are all of my stories before I begin posting. I will update regularly until it's all uploaded.**

**Un-beta'd. You can blame me for grammar and Brit-speak errors.**

**Although I admit that owning these characters would be nice, I'm not nearly that creative. I thank the creators of Sherlock for allowing me to play with their toys.**

Chapter 1:

A short, thirty-something blonde woman rushed, panicked, into a sterile, vomit-colored room. After taking a brief moment to get her bearings, she pushed urgently to Sherlock Holmes. The detective looked unaccustomedly out-of-sorts and was, incidentally, sopping wet and covered in blood from mid-waist to his shoes.

"How is he?" the woman demanded, her eyes wide.

Detective Inspector Lestrade angrily responded to the rude interruption of what had been, to this moment, a whispered two-way argument. "And just who in the Hell are you?"

"Harriet Watson, I presume," filled in Holmes, with the air of a man who didn't have time to point out that water is moist. "He's been shot." Having supplied the distraught woman with all relevant, currently available information, Holmes returned to his conversation with Lestrade. "It cannot possibly JUST. NOT. BE. THERE."

Lestrade took an unconscious step backward, not certain whether he should be responding to John Watson's sister's worry or to the unprecedented level of what could only be called 'passion' reflecting from the usually cold Sherlock. Making a decision, he opened his mouth to respond that the gun in question could, indeed 'not be there,' and was, in fact, NOT THERE, when Harriet Watson interrupted again.

"He's been shot? I know he's been shot! Some police woman told me he's been shot! How IS he?"

"I DON'T KNOW how he is," responded Holmes, gesticulating wildly with blood-smeared hands. "If I KNEW how he was, I would have stated such. Now if you don't mind, HARRY, I am speaking with a colleague in the hopes of learning WHO SHOT HIM."

"As far as I'm concerned," interjected a good-looking black woman who had been standing to the side, "you shot him, Freak. Or you may as well have. People who spend too much time around you are bound to eventually get shot."

"Don't do that." Holmes' voice was suddenly, dangerously, soft; like the hiss of a whip before it snaps. He focused burning eyes upon the speaker, all but daring further comments. "Don't imply that John was forced to follow me into that alley, or even to spend his time with me. It cheapens his choice. It dismisses him."

"EXCUSE ME?" began the woman, Donovan, raising her hands and stepping toward Holmes, "are you…"

Her protest was cut short by Lestrade, who stepped between the two and cleared his throat. "Doctor," he said, redirecting all eyes toward a woman who had entered wearing surgical scrubs.

The new arrival asked "Sherlock Holmes?" and when the man stepped forward, continued "May I speak with you privately?"

Holmes quirked his head sharply to the side, and demanded perhaps too loudly, "Why?"

"I have some sensitive medical information to share with you. You are listed as Doctor Jonathan Watson's emergency contact."

Harriet Watson's face flushed, and she stepped forward, only to be stopped by Sherlock's long, thin, outstretched hand. There was dried blood curling along the crevices and under his fingernails. He didn't look at Harry, addressing only the doctor. "How is he?" he demanded.

Taking this as permission to speak, the woman glanced needlessly at her chart. "He's stable. He's being taken to surgery now. The bullet passed below his right lung, tearing his diaphragm and damaging both his liver and his right kidney. Until the surgeons take a closer look, there is no way to know how extensive the damage is, but his lung seems intact." She turned what Lestrade thought of as completely unnecessarily gentle eyes upon Sherlock Holmes, and offered, "We have some scrubs you could change into if you'd like some clean clothes." Again unnecessarily, the doctor reached to put a comforting hand upon Sherlock's shoulder.

Lestrade raised his eyebrows, ready for an inevitable snide remark from the Consulting Detective, but it never came. His ordinarily contact-averse associate didn't even look at the doctor's hand. Instead, Sherlock glanced down at his ruined clothing and his naturally pale features turned a shade of green Lestrade had never seen in the man. Could the ever-observant Sherlock have REALLY missed the copious amounts of blood on his trousers? The DI looked, _really looked_ at Holmes for the first time in more than an hour, and his jaw dropped open. Could it be that the sociopathic Sherlock Holmes was SHAKEN? Lestrade was so startled that he missed Harry Watson's next words, picking up only the doctor's response.

"I'm sorry; I don't have you listed here."

"I MUST be listed," Harry whined. "I'm his sister."

"I'm sorry. I'll speak to him when he wakes up."

"When will that be?" interjected Holmes.

"I'm sorry." Replied the doctor, and Lestrade decided he was tired of hearing those words from her. "I just don't know. We'll know more once surgery is complete."

**2 HOURS EARLIER**

Lestrade completed his circuit of the uniformed officers who stood at regular intervals around his crime scene. All had returned from canvassing the neighborhood, looking for witnesses to a particularly heinous triple murder. Unfortunately, the residents of this less-than-savory portion of London had an unhelpful attitude toward police at best. Apparently, not one 'witness' had seen a thing.

Lestrade had, in fact, had difficulty convincing the illustrious Sherlock Holmes to investigate a murder in this neighborhood at all; the occurrence was as Holmes had callously stated, "ordinary." The consulting detective's interest had only been piqued by Lestrade's sharing of a series of photographs of the bodies. The three victims had each been shot in the small of the back, paralyzing them from the waist down. Each, apparently while still alive, had been stripped, drained of all blood with near surgical precision, and upon exsanguination posed so that the three bodies collectively formed a large circle. Their accumulated and slowly coagulating blood had been left in a large, round glass bowl in the circle's center. Upon seeing this, Holmes had moved from singularly uninterested to giddily happy in naught-point-three seconds.

As Lestrade returned to the grizzly tableau still residing in the wide alley between two tenement buildings, he observed his sociopathic consultant. Holmes was stretched out grotesquely, having placed himself in the position of one of the bodies, which had been moved a meter or so aside to allow for Holmes' experiment. He looked dead; a thought the DI's mind determinedly slid away from.

The consulting detective's flatmate (friend? Colleague? What the Hell was John to Sherlock anyway? The pair had been through far too much for Lestrade to fathom their true relationship.) John, stood over him grimly snapping photos and markedly NOT speaking in response to one of Sherlock's rambling monologues. A light rain had started some time before. Holmes, face up to the drizzle and lying in a slowly forming puddle, didn't seem to notice the water slicking back his black curls or that his rather obviously expensive coat was soaking through. John shrugged uncomfortably as a trickle dripped from his hair and down the collar of his jacket.

Lestrade had come to like John Watson, and enjoyed both speaking with the doctor and reading his blog. He couldn't, for the life of him, understand how such a man—how ANYONE—could live in the same house with Sherlock Holmes for two years, let alone how he'd regained his footing under later circumstance. Watson had somehow made Holmes almost human, had kept the detective alive even in death, and Holmes gave Watson…something. The intensity of…was it life?... in John before, during, and after Sherlock's absence…Lestrade once again dismissed that thought as he approached the pair. "Anything?"

"Obviously." Holmes' eyes opened suddenly and he jumped up from his now-sodden resting place. He pointed vaguely to his right. "He's not from here. He lives East of here. Some distance, I'd presume, from his stride, but reachable on foot had he not been dragging three dead people when he arrived. He was in a hurry when he left, probably because someone saw him posing the bodies. That's why he left the car. He's not professional at this type of thing, at least not yet. You'll find the gun a block or two East of here, in a gutter or some such. This wasn't as interesting as you had led me to believe. Maybe in a year or two, once he catches his stride…"

Sherlock abruptly stopped talking as a man in the nearby crowd broke and ran, headed East. Lestrade, Holmes, and Watson, along with a nearby uniformed officer, fell immediately into pursuit. For Holmes this meant running, without explanation, West and then South at the first crossing alley. John started toward the runner, noted his colleague's direction, and did an abrupt about-face to follow Holmes. Lestrade and the officer continued East. Some thirty seconds later, Lestrade pulled up suddenly when an unmistakable gunshot rang out, echoing from the nearby buildings.


	2. Chapter 2

**Language warning-people speak rather harshly when in pain. Nasty cursey-worsies in this chapter.**

**Disclaimer in Chapter 1. Again, all errors in grammar and voice are mine.**

John Watson had been doing what he secretly thought of as his "skull impression." This mainly involved standing (today, in a steady, dripping rain), being a silent face at which Sherlock Holmes spoke. Not _with;_ at. In this instance, Sherlock had been sprawled, rounded into what looked like an uncomfortable position on the wet pavement, his body forming one link of a circle which also included two naked corpses, each drained of his blood. The space in which Holmes lay had VERY recently been occupied by a third such body, the only woman in the group of victims. Sherlock, being a tall man, hadn't quite fit in the space vacated. He had solved this minor inconvenience by propping his feet on the forehead of the next corpse in the circle. John hadn't bothered to tell his friend that this was inappropriate and more than a bit personally upsetting. He'd only have had to explain why.

When DI Lestrade joined them, John pushed back the impulse to shrug apologetically at the man. The Detective Inspector had worked with Holmes far longer than Watson had, and was moreover less personally invested in Holmes's wellbeing; likely he was at least minimally inured to this type of behavior.

Lestrade nodded to Watson, took a breath, and asked "Anything?"

John winced as his friend kicked his feet off of their post-mortal stool and stood. "Obviously," began the consulting detective in what John (not so secretly) considered to be the man's 'punch me' tone. "He's not from here. He lives East of here. Some distance, I'd presume, from his stride, but reachable on foot, had he not been dragging three dead people. He was in a hurry when he left, probably because someone saw him posing the bodies. That's why he left his car. You'll find the gun…"

As John listened, his eyes scanned the nearby crowd; an impulse left over from living for far too long in a place where crowd control was quite literally a life-or-death issue. He met the eyes of a young, dark-skinned male, who immediately ran. At first due to pure instinct, John ran after him. Sherlock also began running; however, the bloody detective ran in the opposite direction. If it had been anyone else, John would have yelled something to the effect of "Where are you going you daft man?" As it was Sherlock, John simply pulled himself up short, turned around, and followed.

Sherlock had already disappeared around a corner by the time John reached the first cross street, and was nowhere in sight for a moment. _Ah! There! _An alley jogged to the right about 30 meters in front of John. He rounded the corner at a dead run, and had just regained sight of Sherlock ahead of him when he felt a shockingly strong and sudden CRUNCH and a hard SHOVE to his back. His arms pinwheeled, trying and failing to check his forward motion or catch himself before he planted his face on the wet bricks. He felt his head bounce off of the hard ground and for a moment all he could see was stars.

The irrational part of his brain clung momentarily to the idea that he'd most likely just broken his nose. Again. The irrational part of his brain then continued, in a snide voice clearly recognizable as Sherlock's, that there was in fact no rational part of his brain. The rational part of his brain caught up at this point. It accessed the memory of another time and place, where this sort of feeling had happened once before. "Bloody Hell," groaned John Watson, aloud. "I've been fucking shot."

Once one has heard it, the sound of a gunshot is unmistakable, even for normal human beings. It sounds nothing like, for instance, fire crackers or Christmas poppers. It also sounds very little like it does in the movies. When he heard that sound as he exited the alley, Sherlock Holmes (arguably the most observant human being on the planet) knew immediately what it was. _Nine millimeter. American? That is the most popular handgun in that gun-obsessed country._ Holmes momentarily paused and took swift stock of his surroundings. Cinder block buildings in front of him; cinder block and brick to his right; brick behind. Asphalt below his feet. Echo patterns. Wet ground. Rain. _The shot came from the brick alley. Behind me. Not the man I'm looking for._ The sound dismissed as unimportant, Sherlock turned toward Bell St, intending to take a right and follow the roadway toward where he knew he'd intercept his quarry. At that moment, John Watson's groan caught his ears, the faintly echoing blasphemy causing him to turn so quickly that it nearly snapped Sherlock's head off of its thin perch.

Runner forgotten entirely, Sherlock began walking up the alley, slowly at first, but with increasing urgency as he located the crumpled form of his friend on the bricks and heard a grunt echo off of the alley walls. He stumbled to a stop to find John lying on his left side at the edge of a puddle, struggling weakly to reach his hand toward the wound in the small of the right side of his back. Blood, streaming from the wound and from John's nose, was beginning to tinge a puddle pinkish against the russet brick. A low, continually grunted string of profanity emitted from between John's clenched teeth.

"John."

The mumbled emphatic cursing continued.

"John." Watson noticed Sherlock as the detective knelt down beside him, half reaching to touch John's shoulder before he snatched his hand back. "What do I do?" The question was professional, rather than worried. Holmes was requesting medical information from a subject matter expert, not worrying about a friend.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck." Watson sucked in air through his teeth and fixed his eyes on Sherlock. "Direct pressure. Press on the fucking wound." A gasp and a bubbling sound from John's ruined nose. "And call the Goddamn cops."

Sherlock moved to behind his friend. Finding the actual wound in the mess of blood which had already saturated Watson's jacket was harder than he'd have thought. Sherlock brought his thin hands toward it slowly.

"God Damn it Sherlock! You kept bloody HEADS in our bloody REFRIGERATOR. I watched you fucking DIE once! Don't get prissy now! Press on the bloody wound!"

He did. John screamed. Sherlock pressed harder. John stopped screaming, began hissing in and out between clenched teeth. Blood continued to leak through Sherlock's long fingers, mingling with the rain and pooling in the cracks in the bricks between the two friends. Sherlock yelled for Lestrade, for Donovan, for ANDERSON for Christ's sake.

John stopped moving.

Lestrade was pulling Sherlock away from his ex-flatmate; from his friend.

The paramedics were there. When did the fucking paramedics arrive?

When did…they were taking John away.

They were TAKING JOHN AWAY.

Where were they taking his FRIEND?

Lestrade was talking to him, holding onto him. Why was Lestrade even touching him? Lestrade knew he didn't like to be touched.

WHERE THE BLOODY HELL WERE THEY TAKING JOHN?


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimers and notes in Chapter 1. **

Chapter 3: **6 HOURS AFTER JOHN WAS SHOT**

Catatonia. That's what it's called. Over the past few hours, Lestrade had sat, and paced, and took phone calls from the men and women who were searching for their runner at the crime scene, but mostly he had observed the world's only consulting detective. There was no doubt; Sherlock was catatonic. He hadn't moved, spoken, _blinked_ in at least three hours. While they'd been in this horrid yellow-green room, the man had remained stiffly ensconced in the same chair, in the same position, for hour upon hour as the sun had set slowly behind the rain-laden clouds.

When they'd heard that John's right kidney would have to be removed, Harry had offered hers as a replacement, saying 'I'm his sister. I'm a match, right?' Sherlock had pointed out that even if Harriet had been a match (of which there was no guarantee) Harry's kidneys were unlikely to be suitable due to her drinking. He'd been shockingly and unsurprisingly blunt to her when he'd said it. She'd left and Sherlock had sat down in the hard blue chair he remained in. He hadn't yet said another word. Harry had returned an hour later with something in a bag and the smell of a local pub—smoke, spilled beer—sunk into her jacket. The jacket was identical to John's. Lestrade wondered if John's had been a gift from Harry, or if Harry had seen his and bought hers to match. He wondered if Harry would be willing to give John hers, now that John's was ruined. She'd offered a kidney.

Lestrade looked back at Sherlock. Catatonic. He checked his watch. He got up to pace again.

**3 HOURS LATER**

Sherlock sat, completely silent, his long fingers steepled, his gaze toward the bed which contained John Watson. He did not actually look at John. It was simply a convenient direction in which to stare as Sherlock's mind replayed the case. There was no reason to actually look at John. John Watson was unconscious; therefore the only important part of John, his intellect, was absent. John's physical presence was unimportant. His physical body was not…important… was this how John had felt for all of those months? Not good. Sherlock Holmes reached his right hand forward, laying it upon John's left. John didn't stir. Sherlock left his hand there.

His mind replayed his observations from the crime scene with near perfect recall and precision. A red minivan, rented by one man and stolen by another, sat with its driver's door open to the West of the bodies. The police probably thought this was the vehicle the killer had used to transport the bodies. It wasn't. It was the vehicle stolen and then abandoned by the witness; likely the man who'd run from the crime scene. It was obvious by the detritus—bolts, cinderblocks, an odd tire—scattered about the open but semi-concealed space. The witness had used the alley before as a convenient location for stripping anything of value from the vehicles he'd stolen. Today, finding the alley occupied by a man posing bodies, he'd stepped out of the minivan to run from, challenge, or perhaps even chase the murderer. Even a career criminal such as he was would have been disgusted by scene in front of him.

Holmes paused. The witness, obviously a criminal, had found the crime scene abhorrent. Sherlock Holmes mulled that over. Should he himself have been horrified by the scene? Probably. John had found it abhorrent, too. Sherlock considered that. He did not look at his friend.

The murderer had been driving a white, beat up, late 1980's sedan, which was, or had been several hours before, still parked on the East side of the rectangular asphalt alley lot in which the crime scene lay. The bodies had been inside its enormous trunk; the blood probably in a cooler or large thermos until it was added to the bowl shortly before the posing of the scene was interrupted. Sherlock spoke without looking up, the tone of his voice implying that this was a continuation of a conversation, rather than the first time he'd spoken since before sundown. "Did you look in the car?"

DI Lestrade's head snapped up from where it had almost settled on his chest. The silence, combined with almost an entire night without sleep and the rhythmic whoosh-whoosh of John's ventilator had lulled him. "The car? Yes. It was clean."

"Not the minivan. The car. The one the murderer carried the bodies in."

"Which car was that then?"

"White. East side of the scene, at the curb. Buick or some other gargantuan American boat of a thing. I told you to look in the car."

"You didn't tell me. How did you…"

"Direction of drag of the bodies indicated where they were dragged from. Killer didn't have time to rearrange their hair to hide directionality. He was interrupted. You'll find blood inside the trunk of the white car. And a cooler. Maybe a tank, something like that. Did your footmen find the witness?" All of this was delivered extremely quickly; the detective didn't take a breath throughout.

"My 'footmen'?"

"The officers who use their feet. The ones in uniforms. Did they find him? He was on Bell Street."

Lestrade took a moment to get his bearings; Sherlock's voice was traveling as fast as his mind, an almost breakneck speed which rendered his words difficult to understand. Lestrade needed to catch up before he could answer the man's question. "Do you mean the man who ran from our crime scene?"

"Yes. He interrupted the posing of the bodies. He'd expected to use the area to strip the minivan. He's done it before. Nasty surprise. He'll have a record. Look in your computer. Have you booked him yet or will it wait until morning? Is it morning yet?"

Lestrade knew that he was usually off-balance when his consultant spoke, but it had just occurred to him why this time was more unsettling than usual. Holmes hadn't insulted him once; not a snide comment, not even a snide tone to his voice. The man wasn't looking at him, which wasn't unusual, but he _was_ looking at _something_; John's hand. Sherlock's foot was tap-tap-tapping a tattoo on the floor…and…was he…sweating? "Officers are going door to door. They will find him. They've got his description. I'll ask someone to enter the description into our system. Maybe they'll find a match." He took a breath. What he was about to do would be… uncomfortable. Moreover, what he was about to do was, well, it was _John's job._ "Sherlock?" The word was gentle. Sherlock's foot tap-tap-tapped. He continued staring at John's hand. "Sherlock, we need to talk about this."

"No."

"No?"

The response had been delivered in the same monotone as the rest of this conversation. There had been no pause, no anger; no inflection at all. "No. We do not need to talk about this. Your people need to find the gun. And then I need twenty minutes alone with the person holding it, in a tall building which has windows that open or in a dark, private place. That's what I need. I told you where the gun would be. If it wasn't there, then the person wasn't behaving as people do. People behave in certain ways. Everyone does as is expected."

"Current company notwithstanding."

"I have found that, for someone like me, acting within societal norms makes for a difficult and short life. I should amend my prior statement. _Nearly _everyone does as is expected. This man shoots people in the back. That presents a certain profile; he is craven, but not stupid." The detective paused, a thought occurring to him. "However, he shot John in the back while surrounded by the bulk of the Metropolitan Police Force and, more importantly, twenty meters from me. That was a stupid act. It was not an act within norms. That suggests a deranged personality; a man who does not follow his own established normative behavior pattern. It strongly suggests someone who does not follow societal expectations. Who doesn't follow societal norms?"

Lestrade refrained from pointing out the obvious answer to this question. He simply watched Sherlock and listened to the whisper of what was obviously intended to be an internal monologue.

"The insane—no, the bodies were too organized for that type of mental disorder. Sociopaths and psychopaths are patterned. Mental impairments either have, or do not have, order within their own constraints. The monumentally stupid—no, we've already determined that he's not. Certain disabled—unlikely considering the amount of planning and number of steps necessary to create the crime scene. What if it was two people? One committed the crime, while the other…" a pause. "Children," whispered Holmes. "Young children are unpredictable and impressionable." His hand tightened on Watson's as he seemed to deflate. "Random street violence, in a random alley." Ordinarily the concept would have been terribly dull, but the sound of a ventilator pushing air carefully into John's bruised lungs made it strangely immediate. The immediacy was distasteful. Sherlock looked at Lestrade fully for the first time in hours. "A child found the gun after the murderer rid himself of it."

"That happens from time to time." Lestrade agreed gently and somewhat grudgingly. He cocked his head, looking first at Sherlock and then at John. "Are you saying that a child shot John?"

"Yes." Sherlock moved his eyes from John's hand to his closed eyes. "A random crime, unrelated to the murder. The murderer has an ordered mind. The child likely simply shot at what he thought was a police officer. In that neighborhood, he'd probably been told that you are the enemy. And he shot John." Sherlock seemed to shrink in on himself; taking his hand from Watson's as he crumpled deep into the hospital chair he'd taken station in. Minutes passed before he looked up at last, with a pleading visage, at Lestrade. "It wasn't my fault. It wasn't John's. It was not relevant. That's not right. Not good. John…this…it is for nothing. It's completely unrelated. The gun is… Look for a young, likely male child who lives along the alley. His family, likely his father, will have brushed unpleasantly with the law; may even be in prison. He's got the gun which was used in the murders. He picked it up. He used it to…" Holmes' eyes narrowed, now focused laser-like on Lestrade's. His voice was vicious, quietly murderous. "You won't permit me to defenestrate the violent little twat will you?"

"No."

"Fuck." He leaned forward to take his flatmate's hand again, resuming his state of silent stillness.

Lestrade quietly left to give his officers their new instructions.


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimers and relevant information in Chapter 1.**

Chapter 4:

Sunrise found Sherlock pacing back and forth, back and forth over the few meters of available space to the right of John's bed. Three strides one way, three strides back, with a quick turn at each end. The turn would have been militarily precise had it been John Watson doing the pacing. As it was the mad genius, a certain terse flamboyance marred the thing. Sherlock was soliloquizing. He would have been playing his violin, but the nurses had made it unutterably clear that his fetching the instrument from his flat was unacceptable. He'd annoyed them somehow. They'd wanted him to leave. He'd refused. Police had been called. Lestrade had come. Sherlock had been allowed to remain, but the violin hadn't been fetched.

Seriously, this was an intensive care unit. He couldn't have disturbed the patients; they were uniformly unconscious.

He glanced at John, who remained as he was. Still, seemingly in restful sleep if one were to ignore the medical paraphernalia. John was often still, but never restful. Tense. John was always tense. Sherlock shook his head to rid it of an intrusive thought; John, seen from above, collapsing on the sidewalk in front of Barts. Sherlock was having difficulty concentrating on the case at hand; quite unlike himself really. Stray thoughts kept interrupting. A text alert sang out from his phone. Harriet Watson. Another interruption. Sherlock turned his phone off without looking at the text.

"…and another thing;" Holmes continued from where he'd left off in his recitation, "The car was an American make, as was the gun. The car was retrofitted to put its wheel on the right side, but it once was an American car. How anyone can adjust to…never mind. Our murderer is either an American or spent a fair amount of time there. He'll have an accent. The idiots on our Metropolitan Police squad couldn't possibly have an easier time. I gave them the car, the gun, the witness. The witness gave them the neighborhood, the description. I TOLD THEM where to look and what to look for. SMALL. THIN. CAUCASIAN. MALE. GLASSES. AMERICAN ACCENT. **DO I HAVE TO HOLD THEIR HANDS**?"

A nurse bustled into the room for the seventeenth time, annoyedly shushing Sherlock and unnecessarily straightening John's sheets. She smelled of tobacco. Marlboro Reds—another American brand. Irrelevant. The nurse checked John's monitors (did she truly think Sherlock was unaware of every readout?), glared once more at Sherlock, and exited in a huff. John remained still and at rest. Sherlock growled and began pacing again.

The Metropolitan Police footmen—foot officers?—given precise instructions, had found the boy who had shot John. He was eight years old. He'd seen the gun in the gutter one block East of the crime scene as he'd walked home from school and had picked it up because it was 'way cool'. He'd only ever seen one on the telly before, and wouldn't his friends be jealous if he showed them this cool thing at school the next day. Hours later, he'd been sitting on his steps wondering if the pistol really worked when he'd seen two police guys running down the alley. When he'd fired the gun from the stoop of his building, he'd been surprised by how LOUD it was, and how much his hand and arm flew back. He'd nearly fallen down the stairs, his ears ringing, as he saw the shorter guy fall down. The short guy said a bad word, and the boy had only then realized what he'd been doing, and that he might get in trouble for shooting somebody, even a cop. He'd run inside and hidden the gun under his bed.

Officers had found it precisely twenty one minutes after Sherlock Holmes had told them where to look. The boy's mother had yelled and screamed, but mostly at the police, for invading her flat. The boy's father hadn't been there; he was incarcerated on drugs charges. The boy was looking forward to telling the story to his school mates. They would see that he was tough like his father.

Twenty-four hours after John was shot while pursuing the witness, DI Lestrade had personally arrested the witness who had run from the crime scene. Sherlock's homeless network had located him after being collectively roused to action by what they considered an attack on one of their friends. Several dozen who knew John had combed the neighborhood, showing a sketch Lestrade and Sherlock had created to every prostitute and street dweller they came across. The network had found Arnold Newman in a dingy fourth-floor apartment with no lift and had been touchingly disappointed that Holmes insisted they not kill him before Lestrade was allowed to question the man.

Newman had been relatively unknown and unnoticed in the run-down neighborhood; a small-time thief and car-parts seller was not remarkable in an area of the city where bigger, tougher criminals were found on nearly every block. He'd never committed violence more interesting than taking a drunken swing at a fellow at a bar; in fact, he admitted readily to being sickened by the sight of blood. As Sherlock had predicted, Newman had stumbled upon the posing of the bodies and had cried out in disgust at the gruesome scene. Hearing him, the fledgling serial killer had fled, but not before Newman had recognized him as the friend of a "friend" who'd supplied Newman's small-time drugs habit. Newman traded the murderer's identity for a get-out-of-jail-free card and a sandwich shortly after being apprehended.

48 HOURS LATER

Sherlock had retaken his position on the hard, uncomfortable hospital chair. He once again held Watson's hand, but had ceased speaking at the man's still form. Henrietta Watson ("Oh for fuck's sake call me Harry.") had taken the seat formerly occupied by Lestrade, who had been in for an hour or so after making an arrest based upon Newman's information. Sherlock's descriptions (Caucasian, male, small, glasses, British accent overlaid with a Texas drawl from twelve years in the states) had been predictably accurate.

'Harry' was talking; had been for some time. Holmes didn't listen much to what she was saying. Something about the 'propriety' of Sherlock being John's emergency contact, her 'right' to his medical information. She'd been saying much the same for the past three days. Uninventive. Uncreative. Dull. She was slurring her words. John would have been pissed about that, if he had been awake.

And then he was.

It didn't happen the way it did in those insipid telly programs Mrs. Hudson watched. There was no blink; no slow, blurry coming-to; no twitching hand grasping Sherlock's. John was still, and then he wasn't. His eyes shot open in panic, his hand wrenching from Sherlock's to grab the tube which was invading his throat, pulling at it instinctively before his rational, medical mind caught up and was able to comprehend what this THING was. Then he froze, his hand still grasping the ventilator tube, and moved only his eyes to Sherlock's, soundlessly demanding help. On John's other side, Harry fumbled with the nurse call-button, dropped it, retrieved it, and finally managed to press it. John's eyes remained on Sherlock, the pulse meter showing a rising level of instinctive terror, even as his body was stiff and perfectly stationary. Still, but not resting.

Tense.

John had returned.


End file.
